Gaming machines, such as slot machines, video poker machines, and the like, have been a cornerstone of the gaming industry for many years. Generally, the popularity of such machines with players is dependent on the likelihood (or perceived likelihood) of winning money at the machine and the intrinsic entertainment value of the machine relative to other available gaming options. Where the available gaming options include a number of competing machines and the expectation of winning at each machine is roughly the same (or believed to be the same), players are likely to be attracted to the most entertaining and exciting machines. Shrewd operators consequently strive to employ the most entertaining and exciting machines, features, and enhancements available because such machines attract frequent play and hence increase profitability to the operator. Therefore, there is a continuing need for gaming machine manufacturers to continuously develop new games and improved gaming enhancements that will attract frequent play through enhanced entertainment value to the player.
However, the market demand for new games and features does not remove the regulatory requirements associated with validation of production software by independent agencies or testing services. Even though these validation organizations can use a diagnostics BIOS to access certain features of an EGM, the manual interfaces available for testing and the need to hand enter data such as random numbers is time consuming, may introduce errors into the testing process, is not reliably repeatable, and can place the EGM in modes that can only be recovered from via a reboot requiring up to 15 minutes per occurrence.
Because EGMs may operate in a gaming mode only with certain physical safeguards in place, a traditional in-circuit emulator may not always be an option for validation testing.